


Then Burn the Ashes

by Theluminousfisheffect



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Chronic Pain, Crowley Has Chronic Pain (Good Omens), Hurt No Comfort, Light Angst, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 07:50:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20078719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Theluminousfisheffect/pseuds/Theluminousfisheffect
Summary: Crowley burned when he Fell. 6000 years later, he’s still burning.





	Then Burn the Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> So, I don’t really know what this is. I opened a document with 3 lines in my head and this is what fell out. 
> 
> It’s beta’d in the fact that I re-read it immediately after I finished it and was too zoned out to tell if it was any good or not, impulse-sent it to my girlfriend and she sent it to some other people who apparently liked it so here, have it.
> 
> Yes, I’m aware the title should be a Queen song and that it’s a Fall Out Boy one instead. It worked.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading!

Crowley burns.

He sits, perched on the edge of his bed with his toes planted against the floor and his hands pressed hard into his face. He’s hunched over himself, his bony elbows digging divots into his thighs. His heels don’t touch the ground because somehow putting his feet down only worsens the pain. His whole body is trying to curl in on itself, to wrap around its centre and compress itself, squeeze smaller and smaller until he’s too small to exist, like the centre of a black hole warping space-time around it.

He deflates, breathes out, shaky and slow, and tries to move, sliding his elbows from his thighs to his knees. He rocks to a rhythm that feels like it’s being conducted by his soul but it does nothing to ease the fire in his veins. He wishes it was fire. Fire burned but not the same way. Fire was detached, impersonal. It didn’t care what got in the way. It burned and charred and devoured everything in minutes and went on its way, leaving the scorched corpses in its wake. Fire was powerful and murderous but it wasn’t torturous. Sulphur on the other hand, well, falling into a burning pool of that stuff was a different beast entirely.

Sulphur clung in a way that fire did not. It wrapped its monstrous hands around you, drawing you in closer, exposing more of you to its touch until it framed each piece of you intimately, until it was every much a part of you as your skin. Fire would leave. Sulphur stayed. It stayed for 6000 years, corrupting you from the inside out. It made you burn until you lost yourself, until there was nothing left except the fiery red glow and the screams inside your head. It branded you, so that you and the whole fucking universe knew that you were being burned. Being roasted alive. Being cauterised, like an open wound. You were something that was wrong, something bad, something that needed to be fixed or punished.

Crowley would have much preferred fire.

He brings his hands together over his nose and mouth, fingertips touching and pressed firmly against his forehead. He doesn’t need to breathe but holding it in only enclosed the heat within his aching body and he needs to expend as much of it as he can. (Of course he knows that wasn’t really what was happening but he will take any illusion of easing the suffering that he can get.) He thinks about releasing his wings but the thought of making himself bigger made his stomach curdle. Wings meant more surface area to burn so he keeps them hidden, safely tucked away from the fire and brimstone ravaging through him.

His eyes have lost all traces of white. He knows this without having to see them. The sulphur has burned it away, seared his eyes yellow ochre in a sick rendition of itself, like one big fucking cosmic joke. Crowley is sick of being the fucking punchline.

He eases himself gingerly onto his side, wishing his hair was longer so that he could twist it around his fingers. It was the same shade of red as the sulphur but that didn’t bother him the same way his eyes did. His hair had been red before. It had always been red. It wasn’t connected. His eyes hadn’t always been perverse.

He coils himself into the foetal position, one arm shielding his eyes and the other, his head. His bones feel like they are fracturing, twisting and cracking in the intensity of the blaze. His body is much too fragile. It isn’t built to withstand this kind of torture. Torture hadn’t yet been invented when his body had and how could he be prepared for something that didn’t exist?

He keens and hates how pathetic it sounds in the emptiness of his bedroom. Satan, had it hurt this much the first time? He can’t remember. Can’t remember anything anymore, suspects he’s forgotten his own name, _both_ of his own names and his flat and his car and his plants and his angel – _please, somebody, don’t let him see me like this, not ever, please, it would hurt him so much, it would kill me. Please, if there is any sort of mercy left in this universe._

He wasn’t exactly sure there had been any to begin with.

Crowley groans as a particularly nasty wave of pain rolls through his shoulders into the hollow of his chest and settles there like a lance through his heart. He rolls onto his front to bury his face into the silk sheets. His long legs stretch out beneath him until his feet hit the pillows and he wills the cramping muscles in the base of his spine to relax. He feels his teeth lengthening as he loses more control. His tongue starts to fork, stuck halfway between a human’s and a snake’s and is much more uncomfortable than being one or the other. It feels odd brushing against his still mostly human teeth.

His breathing is shallow now as the sulphur rages on through his body ceaselessly. His fingers twitch in his hair, yanking the strands unkindly but he barely registers it over the rest. He can’t think of anything else besides the burning. It has consumed him entirely.

His free hand brushes unthinkingly over his shoulder, high on his back. It dissolves into scratching as if he’s trying to peel away his skin to let the sulphur pour out of him. Another wave of pain makes him yelp and flinch so hard that he almost bites through his bottom lip. Teeth gritted, he screws his eyes shut and grunts in agony until it eases slightly.

He can taste his own blood on his tongue. Maybe he has bitten through his lip after all.

He wants to sleep. He would give his right arm for a year of sleep. Maybe even for a month. He won’t sleep until it eases. Won’t be able to.

He has no idea how long he has been like this. It feels like centuries. He wants to scream and sees no reason why he shouldn’t - the plants are well used to it by now – and so he does. He screams, muffled into his tangled bedsheets, until his throat starts to feel raw and his eyes begin to sting and having spent all of his energy, his fury crumbles into sorrow. It happens so suddenly that Crowley is shocked by the sob that hitches in the back of his throat and hasn’t enough forewarning to stop it. It escapes his lips, calling forth an army of its brethren and Crowley is weak and shaking and unable to stop them. He cries brokenly and hates himself for being pathetic, fingers clenched in his hair and dug deep into his shoulders and he just wants it to stop. He can’t take it anymore. He only ever asked questions. What kind of punishment was this for _asking questions?_

He can feel scales breaking out over his jaw and snaking up around his wrists and ankles. They pop up along the ridge of his spine as his weeping turns noiseless with the injustice of it all. He had thought She loved him. (He still sometimes hoped She might.) He hadn’t even gotten a chance to explain his side. Heaven was always happy to jump the gun straight into dealing out punishments whenever it felt like an atrocity had been committed against it. Some things would never change.

The thought pulls Crowley back hard enough to give him whiplash. As much as he despised what had happened to him, he didn’t really want to belong in Heaven anyway. Not in somewhere that believed in murdering children and letting carpenters get nailed to crosses and plagues and disease and drought and famine and boiling people alive after a million-light-year-freefall for asking questions. The crying subsides as quickly as it began with the sudden sense of realisation and leaves him hollow. There’s nothing left in him now except for galaxies of pain, clustered everywhere inside him, as expansive as the universe itself. His eyes drift shut and Crowley doesn’t dare move from where he lies. He just wants it to stop.

And he sleeps.


End file.
